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Federal programs failed to curb poverty

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Tuesday August 12, 2014 6:17 AM

The voters in central Ohio have sat by for the past several years and watched one federal agency
after another fail in its assigned mission. Think of the Department of Health and Human Services
botching the implementation of Obamacare and the Veterans Administration’s bureaucratic nightmare
leading to intolerable waiting lists for disabled and sick veterans.

Voters have seen federal departments turned into instruments used to harass innocent citizens of
this country. Think of the Internal Revenue Service hounding several hundred conservative
organizations since 2010 or the Environmental Protection Agency trying to regulate the coal
industry out of existence.

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson announced the War on Poverty. The House Budget
Committee estimates that the federal Government spent some $799 billion on approximately 92 federal
anti-poverty programs in fiscal year 2012. And yet, the poverty rate remains essentially the same
as it was in 1964.

The Wednesday
Dispatch article “Homeless count could expand” described how our supposedly conservative
congressman, Steve Stivers, and supposedly conservative senator, Rob Portman, have joined forces
with two ultra-liberal progressive San Francisco Democrats, Rep. George Miller and Sen. Dianne
Feinstein, to sponsor The Homeless Children and Youth Act. Despite its worthy-sounding name, this
bill would add yet another ineffective anti-poverty program to a long list of ineffective federal
anti-poverty programs.

Historical experience should tell us that the federal government needs to get out of the
anti-poverty business and devolve these responsibilities back to the states.

In the meantime, conservatives have to be asking themselves why they would vote for either of
these supposedly conservative Republican office-holders when they run for re-election.